Staying Connected Even Faster with Google Fiber

What is Google Fiber, you may ask? Is it a health supplement from Google to increase your fiber intake? Nope, good guess though. Google Fiber is an experimental broadband internet service provider to utilize fiber-optic technology. That is a lot of technological mumbo-jumbo, so what does it mean exactly?

Do you know what your current internet speed is? Let’s do an experiment really quick to understand the impact of how cool Fiber is. Go to SpeedTest.net and run a speed test to find out how fast your internet connection is. If you’re on campus or in the dorms, you’re going to have some pretty decent speeds (imagine campus internet over the summer when no one is here, it’s fantastic). The download speed for my house is 20Mbps, a respectable speed. Now let’s compare to what Google Fiber will provide. Their free plan will allow for a download speed of 5Mbps, which is 75% slower than what I’m currently running. That’s nothing too impressive, so why is Google Fiber such a big deal? If you move up to their next plan, you get download speeds of 1Gbps! That’s a lot! If you don’t know the comparison between Mbps and Gbps, my 20Mbps would equal 0.02Gbps. The speed increase would be beyond ridiculous, just imagine being able to watch videos without needing to buffer or have a flawless connection through Skype. This, my friends, is the future of the Internet Service Provider.

Even though Google Fiber is really cool, currently it is still experimental and limited to certain cities. Various cities across the nation put in a bid to have Google Fiber be put in their town, some being more ridiculous than others. On March 30th, 2011, Kansas City, Kansas was selected to have Google Fiber, and seventeen days later Kansas City, Missouri also was decided on to have Google Fiber. Since April 2011, engineers have been hard at work bringing Google Fiber to the various Kansas Cities, and on September 2012 the residences were able to experience the mind blowing connection speeds.

I don’t know about you, but I’m half way ready to pack up and move to Kansas City just so I can have my own gigabit internet connection. These are the kind of connections that corporate businesses and large datacenters have, it’s never been available to the consumer at the magnitude that is is now, and it’s only going to keep on growing. If you’re wanting to study networking and telecommunication, Google Fiber is definitely something to keep tabs on, it’s a real exciting new technology that is going to expand exponentially within the next few years.

I hope you all enjoyed the read, and ISU students be sure to take the quiz on ReggieNet!